Rich Aucoin announces quadruple album

Halifax indie legend Rich Aucoin announced yesterday via Exclaim! magazine that his next album will be his most ambitious yet: The sound alchemist known for throwing eras and influences in a blender to deliver sweet-as-a-smoothie power-pop, Aucoin says Synthetic will be a quadruple album, released in four parts over two years.

Recorded at the prestigious National Music Centre in Calgary before the pandemic, the album is going to be an instrumental offering. (Aucoin made the most of his time out west, with an advance single from Synthetic seeing him build a beat on the world’s largest analogue synthesizer, TONTO—yes, the same noise-maker Stevie Wonder made most of his most innovate music on.)

Aucoin’s sense of scale doesn’t just stop at the project’s size, though. He told Exclaim! that the record “will easily have more synths on it than any other record in history.”
“It’s a record that I’m making for both my current musical tastes as well as trying to envision what first made me excited about listening to synthesizers as a kid,” Aucoin says in the intro to the album’s crowdfunding campaign. Season 1, the first part of Synthetic, is due to drop this October—but dedicated fans can get their mitts on a copy now by supporting Aucoin’s latest crowdfunding effort.